Awesome Stuff: Dealer's Choice

from the grab-a-deck dept

If you haven't yet, you owe it to yourself to read Grantland's long, but fascinating, oral history of the 2003 World Series of Poker -- which more or less made Texas Hold 'Em poker super famous, and made it a major TV event, while bringing tremendous attention to online poker since an online-only player named Chris Moneymaker won the entire tournament in his first time ever playing poker at a casino. Oh, and to get enough money to actually attend, he had his friend named David Gamble back him. And that's not even close to the most interesting part of the story.

Maybe it was because I'd just read that when I started thinking about this week's awesome stuff post, but I quickly realized that there are an insane number of crowdfunding campaigns, across various platforms, of people designing their own playing cards. Rather than narrow it down to just three, I'm going to list out a bunch here (without the widgets or videos -- which would just get too long), and you can explore the wonders of crowdfunded playing cards.

Believe it or not there are still a bunch more, but this was getting long enough. Enjoy the long Memorial Day weekend, and perhaps break out a deck of cards. Real cards. Not that stuff on your phones and tablets.

Am I the only one who finds it kind of annoying that Hold'Em is the only kind of poker anyone wants to play these days? I mean, it's a fun set of rules in some ways, and I get why it's the game of choice if you're a serious gambler/competitor... but it used to be that when friends were just playing poker for fun, they would mix it up a bit -- play some draw hands, some stud hands, throw in a house rule here and there, etc. Not to mention other card games. But now it just seems like everyone wants to pretend they are in the poker world series every time.

Moneymaker's book is freaking excellent for "not a poker book." Straight up story of a dude that's just a dude who likes to bet. What's he do right after his win? Spends 15k at a strip club. What do you do in Vegas if you only took 10k and you can't leave until pay the tab? Call up Chip Reese to spot you.